This article was published in 2007.

“This morning we saw pictures of the Warsaw ghetto at Yad Vashem and this evening we are going to the Ramallah ghetto.” – German Bishop Gregor Maria Franz Hanke during a visit to Ramallah in March 2007

Last week, Israel marked the “Holocaust Day” in West Jerusalem amid the usual fanfare of sanctimonious rituals, never-again speeches and glorification of Zionism.

The solemn but also highly propagandistic occasion is manipulated to the fullest by Zionist leaders in order to justify the crime against humanity, otherwise known as “the state of Israel.” -This year, too, Zionist leaders preyed on the memories of holocaust victims by seeking to blackmail the collective conscience of the world into recognizing the “uniqueness of Jewish pain” ” as if non-Jews were children of a lesser God and their pain was unimportant.

Thus we had the political and ideological gurus of Zionism, from the morbidly sanctimonious Elie Wiesel to the pathologically duplicitous Ehud Olmert berate the world for the “reincarnation of anti-Semitism,” a deliberately twisted reference to legitimate criticisms of nefarious treatment of Palestinians, including the adoption of such policies as apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the use of brutal tactics for the purpose of forcing the victims of Zionism to leave their ancestral homeland.

Nobody does or should question the enormity of the holocaust. Doing so, besides being morally unconscionable, serves the interests of Zionism, which has morphed the Holocaust Industry into a virtual religion that encompasses even Judaism itself.

However, manipulating the holocaust to justify the treatment Israel has been meting out to millions of helpless Palestinians is no less obscene and no less outrageous than the utilization by the Third Reich of the outcome of the First World War to wage war on Europe and cause the death of tens of millions of people.

All humanity had suffered through history, recent, past and distant. Nobody, not even Jews, could claim that the suffering of one group is more special and more unique than the suffering of others.

Russia, for example, lost tens of millions to the Nazis in the course of the Second World War. The same thing applies to other European peoples, who too, suffered immensely. The Gypsies were also incinerated and gassed in great numbers in Hitler’s liquidation chambers, but we see no holocaust memorials perpetuating the memory of these hapless and unwept victims as if they were lesser and insignificant human beings.

Of course, nobody objects to Jews commemorating the holocaust and reminding humanity of its evils. I, too, would join conscientious Jews in remembering the victims of Nazism. However, remembering, when done in the wrong way, can be worse than forgetting.

The world, including Jews, doesn’t have to choose between “remembering” or “forgetting” the holocaust or any other enormous crime against humanity. Instead, the choice should be between learning the “right” or “wrong” lessons.

Today, in the name of the holocaust, Israel wants the world to give her a carte blanch to commit another holocaust against the helpless and virtually completely unprotected Palestinians.

In the name of the holocaust and the “never-again mantra,” Israel wants the world to allow it to commit every conceivable crime and every abominable violation of human rights in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, from murdering school children on their way to school “for security reasons” to shooting pregnant women on their way to hospital (also for security reasons) to dumping tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians into modern-day concentration camps deep in the Negev desert.

Indeed, in the name of the holocaust, Israel has been hounding, brutalizing and tormenting four million impoverished Palestinians, barring them from accessing food and work, and utterly ravaging their lives and livelihood as well destroying their streets, colleges, bridges, and power stations. And, as if these obscenities were not enough, the Israeli state has augmented its oppression with an Satanic wall that is effectively reducing the bulk of Palestinian population centers into updated versions of the Ghetto Warsaw.

In short, the holocaust and the memory of its victims, have been used and are being used outrageously and relentlessly by Israel in order to justify and legitimize crimes against humanity that, while not as enormous as the holocaust in their magnitude, have non the less many similarities with it in terms of their brutality, insidiousness and criminality.

The holocaust, we all know, didn’t start with Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen. It started with a book, some sporadic acts of harassment, a Kristalnacht, and some discriminatory laws against Jews, things very much like what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians

Today Israel is on its way to being a fully-fledged apartheid state. It systematically discriminates against its non-Jewish citizens in ways reminiscent of the overall German discourse against Jews in the mid 1930s.

One ominous portent is the fact that a majority of Israeli Jewish citizens, who are bombarded 24 hours per day by virulent anti-Arab propaganda, readily support the deportation of non-Jewish citizens who make up nearly a quarter of Israel’s population. Needless to say, this state of affair is very similar to the state of affair that prevailed in Germany prior to the outbreak of the Second World War.

Unfortunately, the holocaust, which was perpetrated by Europeans, has caused European states to go morally blind, a blindness that, even today, is preventing most Europeans from seeing the outrageous crimes committed by their former victims against the Palestinians, Germany’s and Europe’s victims’ victims.

Europe has been either completely silent, or blithe, or actively and enthusiastically supportive of crimes against humanity Israel has been perpetrating against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples.

Last year, Israel dropped as many as 3.000.000 cluster bomb-lets throughout Lebanon as, we were told, a “ defensive action” against Hizbullah.

The three million bombs, for those who still don’t know, are sufficient to kill three million children. In other words, they could cause a holocaust, or at least half a holocaust by Jewish calculations.

Unfortunately, this outrage drew only sporadic, shy or half-hearted criticism from European leaders who never stop lecturing the Third world, especially the Muslim world, about human rights and terror.

This is no less than a moral whoredom on the part of Europe. Allowing Israel to turn the holocaust into a propaganda asset, as Israeli journalist Amira Hass wrote recently, enables the Israeli state to further oppress the Palestinians and legitimize the oppression.

“Turning the holocaust into an asset,” wrote Hass, “ allows Israel to present all the methods of the Palestinian struggle (even the unarmed ones) as another link in the anti-Semitic chain whose culmination is Auschwitz. Israel provides itself with the license to come up with more kinds of fences, walls and military guard towers around Palestinian enclaves.”

Indeed, Europe’s, especially Germany’s, obsequious, even acquiescent, reactions to Israel’s unmitigated crimes against the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples shows that Europe has not learned the right lesson from the holocaust.

It shows that Europe is atoning for one holocaust by adopting policies that effectively encourage and facilitate the perpetration of another holocaust.

If this is not moral whoredom, then what is it?

*Khalid Amayreh  is a Palestinian journalist based in Dura, in the Hebron district. He did his university degrees in the United States: BA in Journalism at University of Oklahoma, 1982; MA in Journalism, University of Southern Illinois, 1983. For a long time, his life was not made any easier by the fact that he was largely confined by the Israeli military authorities to his home village of Dura near Al Khalil.

It was published first in Gaza Mom.com 2007.

We’re used to things going from bad to worse very quickly here. But we never expected the situation to get as bad as it has over the past few days.

After a terrifying 24 hours, we awoke this morning to sporadic gunfire, and ghostly streets.

It was a welcome change. Sleep-deprived and anxious, my colleague Saeed, on his first visit to Gaza, and myself headed to Rafah in the southern part of the Strip to continue shooting a series of documentaries we are working on.

Though the gunfire had subsided, the gunmen were still patrolling the streets, each this time casually manning their own turf, masked and fully armed.

Impromptu checkpoints were still set up along the main Gaza-Rafah road, and we were stopped for ID and affiliation checks.

As we approached Rafah, we received word that clashes had broken out there, too, following the funeral of four Hamas men killed in an Israeli air strike the night before.

We decided to avoid the town centre, and headed instead to film near the border area along Rafah’s edge. Young children blissfully flew handmade kites above the iron wall separating them from the Egyptian Rafah. Their atbaq flirted in the infinite sky above with kites flying their way from the Egyptian side. “We play a game with the Egyptian kids” they explained of their unseen counterparts. “We meet here, through our kites, and see who can catch the other’s kites quicker by entangling. So far we’re winning — we’ve got 14 Egyptian kites,” he announced proudly.

The children are small enough that they can wiggle their way through the cracks of the large iron gates along the wall, where once Merkava tanks made their unwelcome entrance to battered camps here. And so they can call out to their Egyptian friends, and learn their names and new kite flying techniques.

Even then, we could hear the fearsome roar of Israeli fighter jets overhead, interspersed with the banter of machine guns from feuding factions.

I then received a call from my father back in Gaza City — a tremendous explosion, the result of F-16 jet bombing a nearby Hamas compound, had just sent intense shockwaves through our house. It was so powerful that it blasted off the windows from my cousin’s home in the neighbourhood behind us. This attack was followed by another then another, and then another.

Hamas’s Qassam Brigades have sent a barrage of rockets into Israel over the past two days. It has been in an attempt to redirect the battle towards the occupation, they say.

There have been six Israeli aerial strikes since this morning. The latest one happened just as we departed Rafah back to Gaza City. The victims this time were two young brothers, standing near a municipality garbage truck that was obliterated.

Even as I record this from back at home, we were shaken by another large explosion, Israelis tanks are amassing at Gaza’s northern border, and unmanned Israeli drones are whirring menacingly, incessantly, overhead in great numbers patrolling the ghostly skies that only the kites can reach, preparing, perhaps, for yet another strike against an already bleeding, burning, and battered Gaza.

* Laila El-Haddad   is a Palestinian freelance journalist, author, blogger, and media activist from Gaza City. She is currently based in the United States. El-Haddad is the author of Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between (Just World Books, 2011) and co-author of the The Gaza Kitchen (Just World Books, 2012). She is also a contributing author of The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict and a policy advisor with al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. El-Haddad writes principally for the al-Jazeera English website and the Guardian. Gaza Mom.com is Laila´s blog.

This article was first published in The Electronic Intifada 2007.

Jamal’s car was sounding more and more rickety I noticed as we drove to his house for lunch. He was late since he had spent the entire day at the Rafah border with some neighbors who were trying to cross to Egypt for medical care. They had gotten there at the crack of dawn only to turn back in the late afternoon without success. Of the thousands gathered a select few had made it across, but they were not among the lucky few. I have to be honest, I have no idea what the hell must be like crossing that border because I have never had the privilege or bad fortune to attempt to do so. When it is actually open, only Palestinians are permitted to cross.

The Rafah border is operated by Palestinians on one side, by Egyptians on the other and has a European mission monitoring the process on the Palestinian side. One of the more positive things to come of the Israeli disengagement is that they no longer man this border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt and yet Israel still controls it from a distance. On a daily basis the European mission is prepared to travel from their headquarters in the Israeli city of Ashqalon 45 minutes away to the Southern most tip of the Gaza Strip to allow passage for Gaza’s inhabitants to the rest of the world. All it takes for the trip and thus the operation of the border to be canceled is Israel’s discouragement from doing so — like the rest of Israeli decision making, for reasons of security precautions of course. Yesterday the border was open after almost two weeks of closure, whereas the agreement that was established between Israel, Palestine and the Egyptians was for its daily opening. When a report was written a year after the agreement was signed it had been closed during the final six months phase for 86 percent of the time. Jamal was exhausted and after a short lunch took a nap in the corner of one of the two rooms in his house.

Jamal’s oldest daughter had just finished her final exams; Hamza, Jamal’s favorite had completed kindergarten and was about to tear up his graduation certificate when I got hold of it. The others had just a few more days to go before the summer break. I asked them what they would do during the summer, “stay home” Maysa told me, “and visit my grandmother.” Om Daher’s mother lived a few houses away. Jamal had drawn a tarp across the open air sitting space in his courtyard to spare us a little from the sun. The boys were running around and his wife Om Daher would order them out of the room every time they got too rowdy. I couldn’t imagine the entire summer going by like this with none of them involved in any activity but being home.

Meanwhile the Israeli surveillance balloon was not far away and the rockets flew overhead at night. I wondered what effect this was having on these kids. Jamal explained that during the past week Daher, his oldest son and him had been standing at the door of their house when they saw a guided missile heading into their neighborhood, “Daher was scared,” he laughed. He described the missile as weaving around homes until reaching its destination, a Hamas facility not too far from their home. Jamal said he had not slept much the night before because of the sound of the missiles overhead and Om Daher complained they could not watch TV, one of the rare distractions and forms of entertainment here, because of the static caused by the movement in the air.

I learned that the large picture hanging on the wall was of Jamal’s recently deceased mother. For the past year he had not been to visit her because the cemetery she was buried in was located too close to the border with Israel. I knew Israel controlled water, airspace and borders, but in Gaza, even the dead are off-limits to visit.

Philip Rizkis an Egyptian-German filmmaker and freelance journalist based in Cairo, Egypt. Philip lived in Gaza City from 2005 to 2007 where he worked for a nongovernmental organization and as a freelance writer. In 2009 his documentary This Palestinian Life premiered at the London International Documentary Festival.

IMEM (International Middle East Media Center)- 2007

Aseel, a 14-year old child, sat at home with tears flooding on her red cheeks after the Israeli occupation barred her from travelling to Qatar to participate in a festival for children, this occupation is not only occupying her land, but also depriving the children from their basic rights.

Aseel is an active child; she loves the world, loves life even among the dark nights imposed by the occupation on her people. She is a member if a local Dabka (folklore dance) group in Ramallah city, in the northern part of the West Bank. She finally had her chance to represent her country in Qatar and in another festival in Jordan, but the occupation does not want her to go.

She was so happy when she heard she can go with her group to participate in the festival, she started running in the house kissing her family, and saying “finally my wish became true, I will travel and represent the folklore of my country”.

But it seems that the Israeli occupation does not like the idea!, her parents are originally from Gaza, and are living in a village near the West Bank city of Qalqilia, her father and grandfather own dozens of Dunams of orchards in Qalqilia. They carry identity cards issued in Gaza, and the Israeli authorities do not allow Gaza ID holders to obtain any permits from its military offices in the West Bank.

Aseel needs a special permit in order to be able to leave, if she leaves without it, she will not be allowed into the West Bank, and will be forced to go to Gaza without her family.

Her father applied the Civil Coordination Office, controlled by the Israeli army, and asked the office to allow his daughter to leave with the band and be allowed back to her family, but, as expected, his request was denied, and she was not allowed to leave with the band.

She came back home with her father, and just felt darkness all around her, darkness spilling coldness on her innocent face, What crime did I commit? She said, Why am not allowed to travel with the rest of my group? Why is the occupation barring us from living like other nations and peoples do? and once again she realized the occupation is bad, and that the occupier is tyrannous.

The occupation stole her happiness, imprisoned her childhood, and imprisoned her hope to live as other children live around the globe.

Her father said that there are nearly 80.000 Palestinians carrying Gaza ID cards and living in the West Bank, “they have homes, and deep roots in this country and the occupiers imprisoned them in their own land”, he added.

This article was first published in The Electronic Intifada 2007.

So much has happened since we left Gaza and in such a short period of time. If it was mentally exhausting being there, it is even more overwhelming being away and processing it all.

I was in Gaza during the months of May and part of June shooting a film (ok, two films) with my friend and colleague — one about the tunnels along Rafah’s border, another about the remarkable story of Fida Qishta and her attempt to establish Rafah’s only true recreation center amidst everything that is going on there. It was exhausting, but rewarding, work. We were traveling to Rafah from Gaza City almost every day, for the entire day, in the midst of internal clashes that gripped the city where we live.

We had planned to leave Gaza around the beginning of June, with tickets booked out of Cairo 7 June. My parents were to come along with us for a visit. As is often the case in Gaza, things don’t always go according to plan.

Rafah was open erratically during the month of May, and closed entirely the week prior to our departure. We received word that the crossing would open around midnight of 6 June. Wonderful, we thought — at least we could make our flight, if only barely.

We spent 14 grueling hours at the crossing, along with thousands of other Palestinians, desperate to either leave or enter Gaza. Busload after busload, entire families were clinging to the ceilings, crushed inside, or piled on top of the luggage in the back. Some fainted. Others erupted in hysterics. Everyone had a reason to. There were mothers separated from their spouses, students needing to return to college, the ill, the elderly. And those with nothing particularly remarkable to justify their reason for traveling — it was their right, after all.

In the early hours, there was a chill, and we warmed up with sugary mint tea and bitter coffee. But by noon, the midday sun was fierce over our heads with no place to take shade. And so we waited. And we waited. And every time a bus would heave forward a few inches, our spirits would lift a tiny bit; everyone would cheer. At one point, hundreds of anxious passengers, each following the advice passed down along the Rafah Crossing grapevine from those who had successfully made the journey across, began to pour across the fence into the Palestinian terminal, throwing their bags over first then climbing across themselves — “It’s the only way you’ll get through today … in a place where there is no order or sense or logic to why and how this damn place opens, you have to find your own way across.” I thought of the tunnels we had been filming, how one tunnel lord told us some people pay him $5000 just to get into Gaza via a tunnel when the crossing is closed.

The European observers of the crossing “suspended” their operations as a result of the “chaos” for several hours. They eventually returned, but by the time the crossing closed at 2:30pm, we were left stranded on the Palestinian side of the crossing, with the Egyptian side only meters ahead.

It difficult to put into terms what it means when a territory of 1.4 million people’s only passage to the outside world is for closed for the majority of the time, and open for only a few meaningless, infuriatingly slow hours when it is open at all.

We returned to our home in Gaza City exhausted, demoralized, dehumanized. We received word the crossing would open again the next day. We debated whether or not to attempt to cross after the day’s events. We had already missed our flights out of Cairo, and attempting to explain Rafah to distant airline customer service representatives was never a simple task.

A few hours later, we were on the road again. We clung to the hope that at the very least, the crossing might be less crowded the next day. We were sorely mistaken. There was perhaps double the amount of people we saw the day before. This time, the packed buses extended way beyond the crossing. We waited till the afternoon. It was only then we began to hear through the taxi drivers that some skirmish had broken out between Fateh and Hamas in Rafah, that the Fateh-led preventative security building there was surrounded. But we made nothing of it.

Never could we have imagined what would happen in subsequent days.

We waited until the later afternoon. The prospect of our crossing became more distant with each passing minute, and each bus that didn’t pass. We felt like we were going backwards, not moving forwards. Demoralized, my father decided he wanted to go back to Gaza City — “let’s just wait until next week, maybe it will be less crowded. We already missed our flight.” “No, wait, let me try one more thing,” I suggested, remembering the advice of one passenger the days before — “you have to find your own way across.”

I had refused to give in to rule of the jungle the day before. But today, I realized if I didn’t do something quick, we would never get out.

We talked to a taxi driver we had met the day before — a sly, strong-headed type you don’t want to get into an argument with, from the Abu Eid family in Rafah. He owned a beat up Peugot that had seen better days. He mentioned he knew a way around the crossing, a path reserved for vehicles belonging to the security forces. Desperate, I asked if there was any chance he could take us through that way. There were no guarantees we would be allowed through, but he could try. And so in a last ditch effort, he drove us to a security gate. We were met with staunch refusals, and “are you crazy — what will they do to us if we let you through!” We pleaded with them, told them how we had waited 14 hours the day before. But still no pity.

Then, an empty bus on its way back from the crossing drove through. Our driver negotiated with him. He too refused, until he heard our story, saw my young son Yousuf, and finally said, “What the heck, come on, I’ll see what I can do.” And so we crossed, albeit backwards. We drove into the Palestinian side of the crossing, passports already stamped from the day before. An officer saw us, remembered us from the previous day, and let us through hurriedly. As we were getting ready to depart, a European monitor greeted me. “Hello, how was your day?” How was my day? Is this guy for real?

“Difficult. The crossing is very difficult.”

“Oh but at least, it’s better than yesterday, at least people are crossing.” It was then I realized these monitors were completely detached from the reality beyond the few square meters they, well, monitored in the sanitary confines of the terminal, and back again, one kilometer, to their headquarters in Kerem Shalom.

And so by evening, we were in Cairo. And slowly, within the coming days, news began to filter through about what was happening in the Gaza we had only just left behind, the Gaza whose gates were closed shut just after we had left it, and whose gates remain shut to over 6,000 people, 19 of whom have died so far.

So maybe you can begin to understand what I mean by mentally exhausting, having left a place where I desperately long to be, even in the worst of circumstances, and yet where I would have been stuck against my will, away from my husband Yassine.

My parents are with me. It is a mixed blessing. My grandmother passed away last week, and my mother couldn’t be there to grieve with her family. Some Palestinians with foreign passports have been allowed through Erez into Gaza, but for those with Palestinian Authority passports (which we carry, and which Abbas has decreed null and void unless issued from his new dominion in the West Bank) there is no alternative other than Rafah. I’ve had so many thoughts about what’s happening. But it’s all been so overwhelming, so unbelievable; that there can be such collusion, both regional and global, so much bullshit, with so little protest.

And of course the icing on the cake is the recent Haaretz report that Palestinian sources said PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas asked Israel (and Egypt) to keep the crossing closed to prevent the movement of people from Egypt to the Gaza Strip for fear that “thousands of people without supervision” could enter Gaza and strengthen Hamas. Something, not surprisingly, that Saeb Erekat and company deny.

Rafah Crossing has been closed for six weeks now. There are food supply shortages. Electricity shortages. Yet the internal situation remains calm, say family and friends.

When, I wonder, will the global conscience finally awake?

* Laila El Haddad is a Palestinian freelance journalist, author, blogger, and media activist from Gaza City. She is currently based in the United States. El-Haddad is the author of Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between (Just World Books, 2011) and co-author of the The Gaza Kitchen (Just World Books, 2012). She is also a contributing author of The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict and a policy advisor with al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network. El-Haddad writes principally for the al-Jazeera English website and the Guardian.

This article was first published in The Electronic Intifada 2007.

Today was the first time in the past seven years that I entered Jerusalem legally. I have a green West Bank Palestinian ID, which means that since the 2000 Intifada started and the wall was built, I’m forbidden from entering any part of Israel as well as Jerusalem, which is only 20 minutes away from my home town of Ramallah.

However, this hasn’t stopped me from going there. I would climb sandy hills opposite to Qalandia checkpoint (the main checkpoint at the entrance of Jerusalem), hide behind buildings from the sight of the Israeli soldiers, and sneak into Jerusalem. The danger was worth a chance to get into the town for the day, walk through the Old City, and be in the world on the other side of the wall.

It was also important for me to see Israelis, to be able to interact with them and see them stripped of the army uniform; it was important for my sanity, and a necessary need to destroy the image of a collective nation of green-uniformed monsters.

Today was different. I was given a permit to accompany my mother to the hospital for her chemotherapy, a treatment that is not available in Ramallah or any other Palestinian city in the West Bank. Basically, cancer gave me the green light to step into Jerusalem.

The trip started very early in the morning. As we got to Qalandiya checkpoint where Israel controls movement between Ramallah and Jerusalem — and which is now more of a border or terminal than a simple checkpoint — we had to prepare our green IDs and permits, walk through a metal detector, and then hold up the IDs and permits to a glass window for the Israeli soldier behind it to see and enter our information into a computer. As I stood there with both my hands holding my papers against the glass, I could only think, “I hate the occupation, I hate cancer, and I hate our desperate need for this city and the hospital.”

As we walked through the border, there was an empty vast space. We crossed and looked for a cab to take us to the hospital, and the first question the cab driver asked was, “Green [Palestinian] or blue [Israeli residency] ID?” When the answer was green, we had to take an alternative and much longer route to the hospital. The color of our IDs determines which roads we can and cannot drive on in and around Jerusalem.

The hospital was huge; it consisted of a number of old buildings. It was the typical Israeli hospital, metal detectors and Israeli flags at the entrance and on the inside, large pictures of the “pioneers” of the state of Israel. It was nothing very unusual. The structure of the Israeli society could be clearly understood by walking through the hospital halls. The janitors were Palestinian, the doctors were Israeli. On the oncology floor there were renovations underway and the workers were, of course, Palestinian.

The oncology unit was very neat and had a lot of nurses, and after we talked to the doctor we headed to a section to get the IV and start the chemotherapy. Soon after we found out that the pharmacy did not approve my mother’s insurance because it was being paid by the Palestinian Authority. What came next was a bureaucratic fiasco to get the insurance cleared, but one person came to our rescue: Rifkah.

Rifkah is an Israeli nurse, probably in her thirties, who works full-time in the oncology unit and administers medicine. She was one of the few in the entire unit who spoke English, and she fought half the staff to get my mother’s insurance approved. She stood in front of my mother, opposite to the administration desk responsible for approving the medicine, and yelled in Hebrew at a couple of employees who were in need of an additional signature to get the dose ready. She kept checking up on my mother for the entire day to make sure got the attention she needed and to make sure all her questions were answered.

The oncology unit in Shaare Zedek hospital in Jerusalem is one of the very few places were Palestinians and Israelis are humane to one another. There was so much kindness and friendliness going on. Everyone on that floor felt the need for a connection, and forgot about the walls, checkpoints and hatred that exists outside.

A few of my friends, my aunt and I sat around mom for the few hours. While the medicine was slowly creeping into her blood stream, we talked about cancer; Jerusalem; positive energy; Washington, DC; my apartment; and a million other topics. Conversations in the chemo lounge were conducted in Arabic, English, Hebrew, and sometimes even Russian, and no one seemed to mind the weaving of words in all accents and languages.

When the treatment was over Rifkah came to say goodbye to my mother. Mom asked her if she would be in tomorrow, but Rifkah said that unfortunately she had taken the day off. “No! It’s my bad luck you wont be here,” Mom laughed. I knew that during that brief moment, my mother forgot the checkpoint, her aggravation with Hebrew — the language of the occupier — and the endless days of curfew and only remembered Rifkah, the helpful nurse, who made her day slightly easier.

Before going back to Ramallah, we took a stroll up the Mount of Olives, and through the Old City. Jerusalem didn’t seem that cozy, familiar, or breathtaking, but I couldn’t help but think that somewhere in West Jerusalem sits an old hospital where understanding, and perhaps even a strange form of love persists.

* Tala A.Rahmeh, originally from Yaffa, is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at American University in Washington DC. She is the managing editor of Folio, American University’s national literary publication.

The Sabra and Chatila massacre is one of the most barbarous events in recent history. Thousands of unarmed and defenseless Palestinian refugees– old men, women and children– were butchered in an orgy of savage killing. On December 16, 1982 the United Nations General Assembly condemned the massacre and declared it to be an act of genocide.

Background of the massacre

The Sabra and Chatila massacre was an outcome of the alliance between Israel and the Lebanese Phalangists. In its long-standing war against Palestinian nationalism and against the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israel found an ally in the Lebanese Phalangists. Despite the fact that Israel was itself responsible for the Palestinian exodus, the common feelings of hostility of Israel and the Phalangists to the Palestinians led to a secret alliance between them. In execution of this alliance Israel supplied the Phalangists with money, arms and equipment to fight the PLO in Lebanon.

Terror had led to the exodus of a large number of Palestinians in 1948. Therefore, the motivation for causing by similar means another exodus of Palestinians, this time from Lebanon, was a common objective of Israeli leaders, and their Phalangist allies. The massacre was not a spontaneous act of vengeance for the murder of Bashir Gemayel, but an operation planned in advance aimed at effecting a mass exodus by the Palestinians from Beirut and other parts of Lebanon. Israel’s participation in prior massacres directed against Palestinian people creates a most disturbing pattern of a political struggle carried on by means of mass terror directed at the civilians, including women, children, and the aged.

Israel moves into West Beirut

The decision to move into West Beirut was taken by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, although it constituted a violation of the cease-fire and the agreement which governed the PLO evacuation. It was also a breach of Israel’s word to President Reagan not to enter West Beirut after the PLOs departure. On the morning of September 15, 1982 the Israel Defense Forces moved into West Beirut and completely occupied it by the following day, notwithstanding the protests of the Lebanese and US Governments. The IDF, however, did not enter the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, but encircled and sealed them off with troops and tanks.

As to the decision for the entry of the Lebanese militiamen into the Sabra and Chatila camps, it appears from the testimony of Rafael Eitan, Israel’s Chief of Staff, before the Israeli Commission of Inquiry that it was taken by him and by Sharon on September 14, 1982. This was followed by meetings between those two military chiefs and the Phalangist commanders to coordinate the operation of the militiamen’s entry into the camps. The decision to allow the militiamen’s entry into the camps was approved by the Israeli Cabinet on September 16 after it began to be put into execution.

The Massacre

Three units of 50 militiamen each stood ready in the afternoon of Thursday, September 16, 1982 at the edge of Sabra and Chatila camps awaiting orders from the Israeli military command. At 5:00 p.m. they were sent into the refugee camps in accordance with the agreed program of action and they then commenced an orgy of killing which lasted until the morning of Saturday, September 18.

According to General Amir Drori, Commander of the Israeli Forces in Lebanon, Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan met the head of the Phalangist forces in East Beirut on Friday afternoon and congratulated the Phalangists on their smooth military operation inside the camps. At this meeting, the Phalangist leader asked for bulldozers. One or more were supplied. The bulldozers were used to dig mass graves into which were heaped the bodies of victims that filled the alleys. A number of houses were also bulldozed to cover up the bodies of the victims.

Description of the scene is given by Loren Jenkins of the Washington Post service on September 23, 1982:

“The scene at the Chatila camp when foreign observers entered Saturday morning was like a nightmare. Women wailed over the deaths of loved ones, bodies began to swell under the hot sun, and the streets were littered with thousands of spent cartridges. Houses had been dynamited and bulldozed into rubble, many with the inhabitants still inside. Groups of bodies lay before bullet-pocked walls where they appeared to have been executed. Others were strewn in alleys and streets, apparently shot as they tried to escape. Each little dirt alley through the deserted buildings, where Palestinians have lived since fleeing Palestine when Israel was created in 1948, told its own horror story.”

Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone, two American journalists who spent six weeks in Lebanon, gave evidence before the International Commission of Inquiry and the following is an extract from their testimony:

“When we entered Sabra and Chatila on Saturday, September 18, 1982, the final day of the killing, we saw bodies everywhere. We photographed victims that had been mutilated with axes and knives. Only a few of the people we photographed had been machine-gunned. Others had their heads smashed, their eyes removed, their throats cut, skin was stripped from their bodies, limbs were severed, some people were eviscerated. The terrorists also found time to plunder Palestinian property as well as books, manuscripts and other cultural material from the Palestinian Research Center in Beirut.”

The number of victims

The precise number of victims of the massacre may never be exactly determined. The International Committee of the Red Cross counted 1,500 at the time but by September 22 this count had risen to 2,400. On the following day 350 bodies were uncovered so that the total then ascertained had reached 2,750. Kapeliouk points out that to the number of bodies found after the massacre one should add three categories of victims: (a) Those buried in mass graves whose number cannot be ascertained because the Lebanese authorities forbade their opening; (b) Those who were buried under the ruins of houses; and (c) Those who were taken alive to an unknown destination but never returned. The bodies of some of them were found by the side of the roads leading to the south. Kapeliouk asserts that the number of victims may be 3,000 to 3,500, one-quarter of whom were Lebanese, while the remainder were Palestinians.

* Dr Ahmed Tell is a Jordanian university professor, and is Dean of Zarka Private National Community College in Zarka, Jordan. In 1980 he received an Award of Distinction from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. He is the author of several books and publications: Higher Education in Jordan , published in 1997, including Abdullah Tell, the Hero and Why Did the Arabs Fail?, both of which are currently under print. Dr. Tell also wrote a research paper about the former Prime Minister Samir Rifai and the Palestinian cause in 1997.

He was an officer in the Arab Legion from 1946-1950 and fought in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.

References

Cattan, Henry, The Palestine Question, Croom Helm, London, New York, 1998.

This article was published in 2000.

All civilized nations use air forces in time of war to defend their homelands. But colonia land  imperial powers have had no limits in using warplanes to suppress revolutionary movements of the third world. For example, the United States leaned heavily on its Air Force in Vietnam in the second half of the last century. American military aircrafts were active in 1960s and 1970s not only in bombarding major Vietnamese cities and harbors like Hanoi and Hyphong, but also in spraying chemicals to transform forests into wasteland.

Israel, as Washington’s strategic ally in the Middle East, has pioneered in capitalizing on its air force as an effective means for mass destruction and implementing horrible massacres against Arabs and Palestinians. Many Egyptian civilian targets were hit by Israeli warplanes and gross massacre ensued during the war of attrition in the late years of 1960s.  Bahr Al Baqar School and Abu Za’abal Prison in Upper Egypt have entered history as two massacres conducted by the Israel Air Force.

Israel used to dispatch its American made advanced jets to bomb and rocket Palestinian refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries on the pretext that “ terrorist bases” existed there. Shortly after the eruption of the second Intifada two years ago, Ehud Barak, the former  Israeli prime minister, ordered the bombing of a Palestinian Security Compound in Nablus  by F-16. More than a dozen of young police officers in their early twenties were massacred  when the F-16 dropped its one ton-bomb at the Palestinian compound.

His Successor, Ariel Sharon, dispatched the F-16s many times against Palestinian public and private institutions. Later on, he enlarged the scope of the F-16’s deadly missions so  as to in include residential buildings. 17 Palestinians, including nine children and mother, vanished under the debris of their building in Gaza when Sharon ordered the one-ton bomb to be dropped (June 26) at the heavily populated neighborhood of Al Mawasi Ben-Gurion was the first Israeli leader who conceived the idea of  “retaliatory” air strikes against Palestinian civilians. He ordered in 1953 the air and land attack on the village of  Kibya. Moshe Sharit, then the Prime Minister of Israel, wrote in his Diary:

“I told Lavon that this attack [on Kibya] would be a grave error…Lavon smiled. Ben-  Gurion, he said, didn’t share my view.”

Ezer Weizman, former chief of the Israeli Air Force, glorified the massacres implemented by the Air Force saying:

“The talent of the nation is to be found in the Israeli Air force…Here, the Jewish people stands out more in its talent, and therefore we are more capable than the enemy.”

On November 20,1967 Israeli war plane bombarded Al Karama refugee camp, near the Jordan River, killing 14 –some of them were children–and wounding 28 Palestinians.

It was published in 2000.

This article examines the academic and legal controversy that has arisen in Israel over a graduate thesis using oral history–the taped testimonies of both Arab and Jewish witnesses -to document a massacre carried out by Israeli forces against the Palestinian coastal  village of Tantura in late May 1948. Though the researcher, Teddy Katz, is himself a Zionist, the case sheds light on the extent to which mainstream Zionism is prepared to go in discouraging research that brings to the fore such aspects of the 1948 war as “ethnic cleansing.” The article also discusses the research itself and summarizes the actual massacre as it can be reconstructed from the available sources. It is followed by excerpts from some of the transcripts.

ON 21 JANUARY 2000, the Israeli daily Ma’ariv published a long article on the massacre of Tantura. Written by journalist Amir Gilat, the article was based mainly on a master’s thesis by Teddy Katz, a student in the department of Middle Eastern History at Haifa University. The thesis, entitled “The Exodus of the Arabs from Villages at the Foot of Southern Mount Carmel,” had been awarded the highest possible grade for a master’s thesis several months earlier. (It had been submitted in March 1998, but for complications having nothing to do with the case itself, was examined only at the end of 1999.)(n1) The thesis is micro historical research on the 1948 war focusing on five Palestinian coastal villages between Hadera and Haifa, particularly on the villages of Umm Zaynat and Tantura.

The testimonies reproduced by Katz in his fourth chapter tell a chilling tale of brutal massacre, the gist of which is that on 22-23 May 1948, some 200 unarmed Tantura villagers, mostly young men, were shot dead after the village had surrendered following  the onslaught of Haganah troops.

 *Ilan Pappe is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.

This article was published in 2000.

Tantura District of Haifa.

An Israeli historian said on Wednesday that he had uncovered credible evidence that troops massacred 200 Palestinians in a single village on the day Israel came into being in 1948. Teddy Katz, who researched events in the village of Tantura for a masters degree, said he had spoken to witnesses including soldiers who were present to support his findings. “It started at night and was over in a few hours,” Katz said of the attack on May 15, 1948. “From testimonies and information I got from Jewish and Arab witnesses and from soldiers who were there, at least 200 people from the village of Tantura were killed by Israeli troops… “From the numbers, this is definitely one of the biggest massacres,” he told Reuters.

Katz said 14 Israeli soldiers were killed in the ambush on the village. The man who led the assault was quoted as saying the villagers’ deaths were a consequence of war and that reports of a massacre were “just stories.” Katz said the attack was mentioned in only a handful of Palestinian history books and in the Israeli army archives. Tantura, near Haifa in northern Israel, had 1,500 residents at the time. It was later demolished to make way for a parking lot for a nearby beach and the Nahsholim kibbutz, or cooperative farm.

Worse than Deir Yassin Katz said the killing spree in Tantura was more tragic and bigger than in the village of Deir Yassin just west of Jerusalem, where more than 100 Palestinian civilians were massacred on April 9, 1948, in an assault by Jewish armed groups. Reports just after the Deir Yassin killings spoke of some 240 deaths though Israeli and Palestinian historians now accept that the number of fatalities was probably no more than 120. Deir Yassin has long stood as the defining symbol of what Palestinians call Al Nakba (The Great Catastrophe).

They use the term to refer to their dispossession and exile when up to 700,000 Palestinians fled from their towns and villages or were driven out by Jewish troops in the conflict between Arab and Jew that surrounded Israel’s creation. Fawzi Tanji, now 73 and a refugee at a camp in the West Bank, is from Tantura and worked until May 1948 as a guard for the army in British Mandate Palestine. He told Reuters he had watched as Israeli troops took over the village, lined men up against a cemetery wall and shot them. Katz said 95 men were killed at the cemetery. “I was 21 years old then. They took a group of 10 men, lined them up against the cemetery wall and killed them. Then they brought another group, killed them, threw away the bodies and so on,” Tanji said. “I was waiting for my turn to die in cold blood as I saw the men drop in front of me.” Tanji said the killing stopped when a Jew from the nearby settlement of Zichron Yaacov arrived at the scene, took out a pistol and threatened to shoot himself unless the soldiers stopped the executions. Katz said other Palestinians were killed inside their homes and in other parts of the village. At one point, he said, soldiers shot at anything that moved. Villagers resisted with the few guns they had, but they were soon taken over. The Israeli newspaper Maariv, which reported Katz’s findings on Wednesday, quoted the commander of the Tantura attack as saying his troops had no grounds to ask questions or spare lives.

“It was war…When you see the enemy opposite you, he doesn’t have a note saying he  doesn’t mean to shoot you. When you see him, you shoot him,” retired colonel Bentz Pridan  said. “That’s how we went, from street to street, and that explains why a lot of people were killed,” he told Maariv.

* Wafa Amr is a journalist, former Senior Regional Public Information Officer at UNHCR, formerly Reuters senior correspondent.